I wanted to become a necessity to others, but solely for my own sake. As long as I could give people what they wanted, they would treat me like a glittering jewel.

People sought music from me without exception. They tried to coax it out of me with sweet words and gentle touches, desperate to get what they wanted by any means, but I actually found those transparent schemes of theirs rather comfortable. If I could tell what the other person wanted, I could simply give it to them and take what I wanted in return.

Relationships like that have a clear beginning and end. If you or I no longer want anything from the other, the relationship wraps up naturally. That was how it was with the many women who threw themselves at me in pursuit of my talent and reputation. They dreamed of fame by borrowing my name, and I wanted proof of an existence that amounted to nothing more than a fleeting moment.

The people who got what they wanted left my side quickly. A month or two at the shortest. Even at the longest, they never lasted more than half a year. I rather liked these shallow relationships that never deepened. Because if someone stayed by my side just a little longer and looked at me closely, the worthless man hiding behind the splendid mask called music would show his face before long.

The moment I find myself most unbearable is when I don’t have what the other person wants. Every time I came face to face with someone like that, I couldn’t stand watching myself sink into a useless human being, so I would quietly slip away. It wasn’t a common occurrence. What people wanted from me was music and music alone, and that was the easiest reward I could give them.

Only you, Danyu Astrid. You alone craved love from me rather than music.

The love she wanted and the love I understood were so different in shape that I could never give her the love she wanted in the end. I found the situation deeply uncomfortable and irritating. To become useless to someone. The uncomfortable feeling I had forgotten since the day I found music came back to torment me. The reason I kept my distance from her so desperately was that I did not want to revisit that awful feeling.

Danyu Astrid was a person who radiated a beautiful light by her very existence. It is a light that comes only from those who have grown up inside absolute love. Looking at that pure, untouched smile unmarked by the world’s grime, and at the self-assured belief that I would eventually come to love her, I knew at once that she and I were of a different kind.

A person finds their opposite just as easily as they find their own kind. The method is simple. Every human being carries their own scent, and people distinguish their kind from their opposite by the smell that has seeped into one another. From your own kind comes a smell so achingly familiar it is your own, but from your opposite comes a foreign smell that never grows familiar no matter how many times you breathe it in.

From Danyu Astrid came a strange fragrance I had never once encountered in my life. It seemed sweet, then before I knew it turned faintly bitter. It seemed cool, then quickly became stifling. That scent was terribly thick and heavy. No matter how many times I bathed or changed my clothes, it was no use. The fragrance she left behind chased after me like a shadow and stirred up my scrap-of-trash life.

A warm family. A gentle nature. Wealth that left nothing to envy. She even possessed music, the one thing I had prided myself on as mine alone. Why had God given one person all of this? When someone had been so desperately fighting just to have that single thing you hold.

Resentment, or jealousy, or if not those, then fear. The end of every thought that followed was always a question about existence.

From that point on, I played the piano not to mock anyone, but to shake off the fear I felt toward you. On days when even music couldn’t help me bear the fear, I wandered here and there in search of someone who would need me. People who were lacking, anxious, and would therefore need me.

“Ah, mmm, Sio! Aah!”

I love the sound of a voice calling my name in rapture. The body that flushes so quickly at a single touch, the eyes that grow wet with longing for me. Whenever a face that had been full of contempt twisted at some point into desperate yearning for me, I would even feel a strange sense of fullness.

“Ah, haa, oh!”

When I moved my hips a little faster, the m*ans of the woman beneath me grew louder. What was her name again? I can’t quite remember. She said she was the daughter of some famous jeweler, I think. No, she might be the prime minister’s daughter. Since returning to the capital, my lovers had changed so many times that I had trouble telling them apart myself.

“Ah, ah, aah!”

At some point the woman’s body trembled and even her m*ans fell away. I poured everything into her as she gasped through her peak, then collapsed on top of her, and a soft, warm sensation spread across my entire body. I slowly closed my eyes, steadied my breathing, and savored the warmth against every part of me, and the familiar fullness turned my mind white.

The moment I feel the warmth of a woman made completely helpless because of me. My existence becomes clear. If this is not love, then what in this world is? From the first time I lay with a woman until now, nothing had ever taught me more about love than this.

Only the brevity of these moments puzzled me. The warmth cooled quickly, and the fullness that had filled my mind receded in an instant to some far corner of memory. Perhaps that was why, at some point, even this kind of self-confirmation stopped giving me much certainty. I needed a stronger conviction that I had the right to exist in this world.

The moment that thought crossed my mind, the sound of knocking came from somewhere distant. It was already past midnight, so I might have heard it wrong. But the faint sound grew steadily louder, and the moment I realized the knocking was no illusion, sensation returned to my languid body.

“Sio?”

I hurried to sit up, and the woman who had been catching her breath looked at me with a puzzled voice. Even under her blank, lingering gaze, I quickly climbed out of bed, threw on my clothes, and made my way toward the front door. The woman sprawled on the bed, familiar with the pattern, soon had her face twisting into displeasure.

“If you just ignore it……”

“Head home for tonight.”

The dismissal came before she even finished speaking, and bewilderment crossed her face. It was an understandable reaction. The person who had been whispering love to her in bed just moments ago was now coldly sending her away. Still, my situation came first.

The woman shot me a sharp look, got up from the bed, and began pulling on the clothes scattered across the floor. She must have been quite angry, because even the hand reaching down to pick them up was rough. She seemed to want me to acknowledge her anger, but as always, I felt little. I passed by her without a word, and a disbelieving laugh reached my ears, but my feet were already carrying me out of the room.

I opened the front door, which was still knocking at steady intervals, and the face I had expected appeared before me. It was Danyu Astrid.

“Danyu. It’s you again, as I thought.”

One look at her red hair loosely tied up and her casually thrown-together clothes told me this visit had not been planned from the start. There was only one reason she would come here suddenly. She must have had another fight with Astaire. My head was already beginning to ache.

“Well, who else would come here at this hour? And you, Sio, today again.”

Whether she knew how much of a headache this was for me or not, Danyu looked me over with perfect composure and furrowed her brow. She seemed to have found not only my disheveled clothes and hair, but the traces of lovemaking left elsewhere on my body. Before I could even manage an excuse, there was a presence behind me. The woman, having dressed herself in the meantime, came out, shot a look at me and Danyu, and walked straight out of the house. At the same moment, a faint sigh escaped Danyu’s lips.

“Is it Miss Schaefer this time? She may be the prime minister’s beloved daughter, so if you treat her the way you used to, you’ll be in serious trouble.”

Ah, so she was the prime minister’s daughter. Thinking that, I gave a light shrug, and Danyu’s expression twisted further.

“I’ve felt this way for a long time, but Sio, keep living like that and you’ll end up getting stabbed.”

“Well, I seem to be in one piece so far.”

I stroked my side and smiled, and Danyu’s lips moved as though she were about to shout at any moment. That was the signal that a lecture was coming. At some point Danyu had started nagging me as though she were my older sister, and once she got started, there was no end to it, so in situations like this it was better to change the subject quickly.

“Anyway, did you have another fight with Astaire? You only ever come to my place on days like this. Why my place of all places?”

“Because Astaire hates me coming here most of all, obviously. If I couldn’t at least have this petty revenge, I’d have already died of pent-up frustration by now.”

“Could you spare a thought for me and the earful I’ll get from Astaire?”

“That’s your problem. Besides, you’re the one who introduced me to Astaire in the first place. It’s an after-the-fact way of putting it, but since you played matchmaker, you’re responsible to the end.”